I'le Dor, page 8
But not this boy. This was his time, for himself.
Brushing past, he went inside to the hallway where there were envelopes on a table. He was relieved that he wouldn’t receive any mail here because no one knew where he was. A patient sending him a note filled with protestations of love, something he would have to deal with at the next appointment. Transference. All that affection that wasn’t real, that reflected someone’s neuroses. The painful realities that would be hard to face in their forty-five minute appointments. It could take months. He saw people who had no insight and to whom he prescribed one drug or another to calm their demons. Maybe he needed a drug also to rid himself of a map with Dallas and Houston as the major cities that had taken over his thoughts. Marie’s new husband, a French Canadian surgeon who had found a position in Texas, was on the staff of a hospital in Houston. Not in Montreal where she’d always said she wanted to live. It wouldn’t have been so bad if Henri hadn’t been a friend of Nick’s. Not any longer.
I hate that fucking bonehead surgeon.
Here in Ile d’Or, he was running away from this new reality. That was the truth, he thought. And it kept chasing him. More fool he since more than anyone he should have known this would happen.
“I can get you fast chick,” the boy said.
Oh, go away, Nick thought. “I don’t want fast chick,” he said. “Do you want to show me a good restaurant?” Maybe the boy was hungry. He remembered how he had hastily gobbled his breakfast the other morning and how conscious he’d been then of the fact that the boy didn’t have regular meals, that maybe no one was looking after him. He would take the boy to lunch somewhere, feed him, and anyway, Nick was suddenly acutely aware he needed the company.
14.
THE DOOR OF the pharmacy was painted a deep red and through the glass you could see the soda fountain along the left side. High stools lined the counter where the original milkshake machine stood. Lucien was on the other side of the store, straightening out the magazine rack. No matter how often he did, it would be a mess again soon. A copy of l’Actualité would have been left on top of one of the newspapers, La Presse or Le Devoir. When he saw Libby come through the door, he waved.
“I came by to say thank you for dinner,” she said.
“Mon plaisir,” he said. “Did you sleep?”
“A little. It was noisy though.”
Nodding sympathetically at the thought of the loud music, Lucien said, “I’ll go get you those ear plugs.” He walked behind the counter where he dispensed prescriptions and took a small plastic container from a shelf. He knew many of the miners ignored wearing the ear plugs, often suffering hearing loss later. When his children were at home, playing rock music, he’d used them himself.
Libby took out her wallet and started to reach inside the billfold.
“No,” he said. “It’s a welcome gift.”
“Well, thanks then,” she said. “I expect I’ll make good use of them.”
“May I pick you up at the same time for dinner?” Lucien asked, suddenly slightly unsure of himself. Maybe one evening had been enough for her.
The telephone rang as he handed the ear plugs to Libby. He spoke quickly. Sore throat. Prescription. Ginger ale. Someone would pick it up. When he hung up, he grimaced tiredly, dark circles under his eyes.
“Did you sleep?” she asked.
“Not much,” he said. “A couple hours. It’s been like this since Guy died. Worse since Susan left.”
As she nodded with a worried frown in which he could see sympathy written, the door opened and a man in blue jeans came over to the counter.
“Export A,” he said.
Libby waited until he left. “I’ll see you later,” she said.
As she moved through the door, Lucien watched her go out onto the sidewalk and stand near the pink flamingo in the window of the club next door. Across the street was St. Luc’s, the Catholic church where Father Chicoine had been priest in the early days. One of the first settlers in Ile d’Or, he was at the parish until he died thirty-five years later. The thought of him leaning forward in the confession box with the purple satin sash bulging over his huge belly still made Lucien quiver. In those days, it was accepted that the priest made the rules for most of the town, how to vote and how to educate the children. Libby must have been glad she wasn’t Catholic. Although he recalled Guy once told him she said it was difficult enough being told to go to church to make her mother happy, that if she’d had to confess to Father Chicoine, too, she would never have been able to stand it.
Lucien followed Libby out onto the sidewalk when he saw her looking across at the church.
She nodded at him. “Do you remember Father Chicoine?” she asked.
“How could anyone forget him?” Almost as if she knew what he was thinking.
“Francine…”
When Francine Dufresne was killed, almost everyone in town went to Marchand’s funeral parlour to see her. The coffin was open and she lay there in a silver lamé dress. Susan had told him that Father Chicoine took a class from the Catholic school to show them what would happen to them if they drank too much. “You’ll end up at Marchand’s,” he’d said.
“I wanted to drive Francine home that night, but she was already in another car,” Lucien said. “She was only sixteen and the driver didn’t look much older. It was just after her father built The Flamingo, you know. A lot of people weren’t speaking to Francine or Michelle Dufresne then.”
“Yes, Mr. McNab wouldn’t let Cathy talk to them, I remember.”
“You have a good memory, Elizabeth Muir. Peut-être c’est l’artiste in you. Oui? You know, when McNab was manager of the mine, any man seen talking to someone let go for high-grading was also fired. It was tough for the Dufresne girls. Michelle Dufresne moved back here a while ago, you know.”
Libby didn’t say anything and the silence stretched out between them. “So many memories,” she murmured finally.
Lucien waited for Libby to say her father told her not to talk to Michelle also, but she didn’t. Instead she thanked him again for dinner and said, “I’m going to wander about for a while, although I’m not sure where I’ll go. And, yes, it would be nice to have dinner with you again.”
Watching her walk away, Lucien observed the sway of a woman he wouldn’t have imagined when they were children. A young freckled kid with pigtails down her back was now an attractive woman whose hips moved in a slight circular rhythm. Going to the cash register at the prescription counter, he took out some photographs from a drawer underneath. One of him and Susan with their children when the kids were teenagers. Another of Susan as a teenager herself, her dark eyes peering out at him. How defiant she was then. When he first noticed her, her father was up in the bush in some remote place where he slept in a tent. Where Jack Lambert went was always a secret; he would say only that he was looking for gold. No prospector wanted anyone else to get there first and stake a claim. Until he did this for the mine in the 1940s, Lambert went off prospecting on his own, looking for that one claim that would make him rich, the gleam of the golden metal driving more than one man to their deaths in the bush. But Jack Lambert knew what he was doing out there and he came back safely each time even though he never found gold. Maybe it was just a good reason to get away from his family; the four children always remained behind with their mother.
Mrs. Lambert didn’t go to the sump in the basement of the Alpha Hotel like Libby’s father, but when her husband was gone she drank at home. Then after a month or two or three, Jack would come back again. Often he would have to get something for the children to eat. When Susan’s mother was sober, she would do a lot of cooking and put it in the icebox. Her father would get out the axe and chop off a chunk of casserole or stew to heat in a large pot on the stove. Or else they would have beans or something else from a can bought at Mulholland’s, the general store where the butcher was at the back in his white apron with red smears on it. The rest of the food was on one side while the clothes, boots and other things like that were on the other. It was on one of these days he’d learned later, when her mother was too far-gone to notice, that Lucien caught Susan with something she’d stolen. He’d started to be aware of her before that; the little buds under her bathing suit the previous summer acted like a beacon.
“Hey, kid,” he said. “What you got in your pocket?”
She started to run, but he caught up with her, put his hand on her shoulder and spun her around. “I know.” Je sais.
“What?”
“You’re a t’ief. Un voleur.”
“You’re a liar.”
Reaching out quickly before she could stop him, he pulled a chocolate bar from her pocket. “I saw you,” he said. “If you don’t meet me down at the mine gates after dark tonight, I’m going to tell Jutras.”
Jutras was the town policeman. Suspecting she wasn’t afraid of Jutras, he wasn’t surprised when she shrugged her shoulders. “Tell him,” she said. “Do you think he’ll believe you?”
“On va voir. Maybe you’d better meet me, little girl.”
She looked at him scornfully. “You can forget that,” she said.
He shrugged. “We’ll see.” Something about her last glance and the way she tossed her hair told him she would come. Although when she got into his father’s car with him, what she wanted to do was drive it.
“I’ve been watching you,” he said.
“Yeah,” Susan said.
When he tried to kiss her, down behind the bunkhouses near the shed by the railway track, she scratched his face and shoved him away. He laughed and leaned back on the other side.
“You’re not a big girl after all.”
“I bet you haven’t ever stolen anything,” she said. “I even stole a fishing rod once.”
“Anyway, so what?” He took her arm. “Hold this.” Guiding her hand toward his crotch, he could tell she was curious because she didn’t resist. He told her to hang on.
“Tabernacle, don’t let go now,” he hollered when she started to, until he let out a loud cry. “Okay, Okay,” he yelled. “Okay.”
“I don’t want to get pregnant,” she said as she slid back on the seat, her hand on the door handle. She looked at his red face and watched his heavy breathing.
“You can’t unless I put it in you.” They could try that next time; he would bring a rubber.
“If you’re lucky,” she said.
Leaping out of the car, she started to walk back toward town. He hollered after her that she didn’t have to walk, but she paid no attention. For all he knew, there wasn’t going to be a next time. When he looked back now though, that night was how it started. What he didn’t understand was how, so many years later, it ended. There was no warning. Or did he miss it? The last letter from Susan was written in English. She had always talked a mixture of French and English in their home, mainly French. Not any longer. I’ve changed my address again, she wrote. Please forward any mail. I have a lawyer and she’ll be in touch with you. No word about what she was doing and she did not ask about him. Was she with the man? He knew nothing. Ripping the letter, he’d thrown the jagged pieces into a large wicker basket under the counter.
15.
RETRACING HER STEPS to the houses that had belonged to the company when she was a child, Libby stopped in front of the one where Michelle Dufresne had lived. As she moved slowly around it toward the lane, she noticed a stoop at the back with a tiny pointed roof that had not changed. From the Muir’s backyard, across another garden and a lane, you could practically see into the Dufresne’s kitchen. As a child, Libby had liked to prowl around the lanes, peeking into windows, trying to figure out what went on in other people’s houses.
It was rumoured there were many men who carried small bits of gold out from underground at the end of their shifts. It had not been clear to Libby how they did that, although she imagined they’d hidden it in their pockets or in their black lunch pails. Sometimes in their mouths and even in their privates. What had been clear then was that Michelle’s father was one of them. Everyone knew it. But when his house was searched, no trace of gold was ever found.
At some point when it was talked about in the Muir household, her father had again said, “I don’t want to see you with the Dufresne girl.”
Michelle was a year or so younger and Libby had been envious of her because she wore lipstick before any of the girls Libby knew and played first base on the mixed baseball team that gathered down on the diamond near the mine in the summer. Her flawless French and Gallic flair undoubtedly came from her father and from her mother a fluent facility with English.
One summer evening, Michelle came up to bat and the men who walked from the bunkhouses past the wire mesh fence around the mine stopped to watch. Libby could see their eyes linger on Michelle. All of thirteen or so, with budding breasts under her t-shirt and long legs that had taken on a more rounded shape, she stood out from the other girls. A little more than a year older, Libby was as tall as she was, but still gangly.
Maybe it was the evening Michelle walked home with her after a game that her father took her aside for what he’d called a little chat. He’d seen them come over the wooden bridge across what was no more than an indentation in the ground between the bush on one side and the houses on the other. Maybe he was waiting to see if they were together.
“I don’t want you to associate with her, Miss Muir. If you do, there will be consequences,” her father said when they were alone in the living room.
Only occasionally had he called her that. How old fashioned it sounded even then, but it made the point he wanted to make. And from whispered conversations the children were not supposed to hear, she knew the Dufresne house had been searched again. She also knew that there was extreme frustration at another fruitless hunt.
Studying the grave expression on his face, Libby quavered slightly as she felt how unjust his words were. “But she hasn’t done anything,” she pleaded.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, his voice firm.
Suppose she dared suggest Michelle might be asked to stay away from her because of his drinking, Libby thought. Michelle’s parents probably saw him stagger down the same gravel road she and Michelle had just taken. But she didn’t. Nor did she ask what the consequences would be. Once she had defied him and he’d slapped her hard across the face, his red palm imprinted for hours on her cheek. That was the only time he ever hit her, but she never forgot it. Her mother was away in Toronto because their grandfather was ill and Sheila and Wally were staying with other families on the property. That night she slept in a car parked in the lane where she could hear a shrill female voice she recognized as Michelle’s mother speaking in English.
“Don’t come into my kitchen in those dirty work boots. I just washed the floor.”
The male response, “Sacre bleu. Tabernacle. Je travaille pour toi et…” A slammed window. She thought Michelle must slink around harsh words sometimes just as she did.
After her father forbade her to see Michelle, Libby met her occasionally at the restaurant on the main street downtown where she figured her father would never see her. It was a place where all the kids went after school. It was called Splendid Sweets. There they ate French fried potato chips and gravy or chocolate sundaes and drank huge glasses of Coca Cola, picking out pieces of music on the juke box. “I was dancing with my darling to the Tennessee Waltz.” Going down the list and then inserting their nickels.
“Your turn.”
If a girl didn’t like the boys who came to the table, she concentrated very hard on the titles on the song lists in the juke box. But if instead she liked one of them, she might ask him to sit down. She might let him pick the music. One June day when one of the older boys who played on the men’s baseball team came in, he spied Michelle in the back booth and moved toward them. Libby watched Michelle’s face turn from a pinkish hue to bright red as she put her head down slightly. A left-handed pitcher who put more runners out at first base than Libby knew until then was possible, his last name was Clark and everyone called him Knobby. He didn’t live in the town. There were always older boys around over the summers who would leave in late August or early September. In their late teens or early twenties, sometimes they were future engineers or geologists who were there to earn money so they could continue with their education. Libby didn’t know what Knobby Clark was doing there. From the rocks overlooking the mine and the baseball field that summer, she often watched him play. And what she knew was that he was handsome and she had a crush on him.
“Hi, Michelle,” he said. “I haven’t seen you down on the diamond for a while.”
He doesn’t even know I’m alive, Libby thought, surprised he knew Michelle’s name. She’d told Michelle she thought he was cute and then she wished she hadn’t said anything.
“No,” Michelle said, brushing out of the way a strand of hair that had fallen over her forehead.
Libby hadn’t objected when Michelle was taken aside and asked not to come to play on the team any longer. She knew it wasn’t fair, that Michelle was their best player. She knew, but she was silent.
“You’re a good player. They need you on the team,” Knobby said.
Michelle shrugged.
“Next game I’ll look for you.”
Libby waited for Michelle to tell him that she wouldn’t be there, but she didn’t. What would Michelle have said if she were alone? It was clear that he had eyes for her, but she didn’t let on she noticed. He remained separate from the crowd who lived on the property, but toward the end of summer, Libby saw him on the main street holding hands with Michelle. By then she was no longer speaking to Michelle and thought that might be just as well.
